The international art event Yes Naturally – How art saves the world is an event initiated by Stichting Niet Normaal under the artistic direction of Ine Gevers. The key questions in Yes Naturally are What is natural, and who or what decides?; Are human beings the only ones to have a say or do animals, plants and inanimate objects also have a role to play?

The exhibition offers a tour of the natural world, including both clichéd images of romantic landscapes with waterfalls and the hard and inescapable facts of environmental degradation. It will wake us up to the reality of oil slicks and genetically modified fish, but suggest that solutions to environmental problems can be found if we are prepared to change our habits: through recycling and new kinds of cooperation we can save the planet.

Artists will propose new and unconventional approaches. Sculptures, films, installations, performances and bioart from Francis Alÿs, Jimmie Durham, Olafur Eliasson, Peter Fend, Fischli & Weiss, Natalie Jeremijenko, Atelier van Lieshout, Ursula Beiman, Marjetica Potrc, Zeger Reyers, Tinkebell, Superflex and Ai Weiwei, among others, will be on display until the end of August 2013 in the GEM/Gemeentemuseum, in the museum gardens, the duneforest and even further afield.

More than 80 artists will use this grand-scale exhibition to present partnerships between humans, nature and technology. You can design your own pet, fungi turn out to be our best friends, you can harvest the city and seagulls are quite tasty on the barbeque. But also: your smartphone is your memory, Facebook is your habitat, internet the new biotope and nanoparticles have become an integral part of our existence.

Aquatopia
group show
Nottingham Contemporary 20 July 2013 - 22 September 2013

Aquatopia explores the imaginary of the ocean deep and features artists from JMW Turner and Rene Magritte to recent Turner Prize nominees Spartacus Chetwynd and The Otolith Group. Fascinating marine objects will also appear amongst the artworks like scrimshaw, glass botanical models and ancient maps.

The exhibition is a collaboration with Tate St Ives in Cornwall, where it will be shown from October 2013 to January 2014.

Despite the desires of architects and planners, the growth of the built environment happens organically at the will of its inhabitants. This environment is a process, not a fixed state. The exhibition Barnraising and Bunkers looks at our impulse for shelter, and how we choose to build. If Barnraising epitomises collective action and co-operation, Bunkers suggest the opposite, a singular act. Barnraising and Bunkers features work by artists who engage with architectural or physical structures, through their construction and our navigation within them, around them and through them.

The exhibition shows us how we often think of urban and rural being in opposition - the former synonymous with presence and the latter with absence. As our basic need to create shelter gave us our first dwellings, so these clustered to form villages and eventually cities. But urban dreams of utopian living and social cohesion do not always survive the accelerated and fragmented organic growth of the places we inhabit. When the dividing line between public spaces and private spaces is drawn so distinctly society will find ways of redrawing the line - or at least blurring its edges.

The devices that once populated the creepy dystopian futures of science fiction have broken through into our daily reality.

Drones of dozens of different types are becoming a part of everyday life. They scout our public (and private) spaces, carrying out surveillance or reconnaissance in the service of nation states and as unmanned robotic tools, armed with missiles and bombs, acting in defence of national security.

According to a European commission document, drones will be commonplace in the skies within a decade. There are already many companies building these airborne, robotic spies for military and police uses, and this has "prompted concerns from civil liberties groups.

Rhôd’s fifth annual exhibition, Future Nature Culture, invited artists to consider the future of the relationship between nature and culture.

Future Nature Culture invites artists and audiences to re-interpret and re-imagine the relationship between nature and culture, beyond exploitation and idealization, towards a future in which we acknowledge ourselves as not separate from, but an intrinsic part of, nature, and the responsibility this implies.

Rhôd is an artist-run project exploring and promoting urban-rural dialogue. Taking its name from the sixteenth century water-mill in which it is based (Rhôd is Welsh for water-wheel) the project involves an annual exhibition held in the building and grounds of Melin Glonc, in Drefelin, Carmarthenshire. The emphasis of Rhôd is on the creation of new site-specific artworks in a variety of media, including sculpture, installation, performance, sonic art, relational /participatory art, and video.

Eastside Projects is finally revealed as a 'puppet state' or 'marionette government'. The art organisation has been taken over by little 'creatures', marking what could well be a latent global condition.

Puppet Show is populated by impersonators, impostors, and transvestites – by ultimately dubious characters that are used to criticise, debase, mock, undermine or protest in the place and voice of others. During Puppet Show, Eastside Projects has been possessed in order to come to life, and speak what cannot be said through the mouthpiece of its puppet population — reversing the role of puppet and puppeteer. Puppet Show in this way exposes the animal and the natural worlds, architecture, music, education, entertainment and death, all subjects analysed through their possible revolution.

Puppet Show includes Edwina Ashton’s ongoing work with dour gormless creatures who undertake the partial or total destruction of Eastside Projects; Simon Popper’s zoomorphically possessed painted objects; a critique of wilderness versus civilisation orchestrated by Spartacus Chetwynd; Geoffrey Farmer’s revelation of a small-scale rebellion in an abandoned institution; Heather & Ivan Morison on the construction of the self and that of natural and cultural histories; Pedro Reyes’ embodied counterfactual debate between capitalism and socialism; souvenirs from Simon Starling’s ‘expedition’ with boats and transplanted buildings; and Jirí Trnka’s meditation on the struggle for creative freedom, all set to the rhythm of Calder’s circus through the lens of Painlevé.

Eden3: Trees are the Language of Landscape
Collins and Goto StudioTent Gallery, Art Space and NatureEdinburgh College of Art Evolution House (corner of Westport and Lady Lawson Street)Edinburgh, EH1 2LE 22 April - 25 May 2013

The Collins & Goto Studio presents an on-going series of works with trees, including Eden3 an installation of trees and technology that provide an experience of photosynthesis through sound, and Caledonia Tomorrow a series of expeditions and related inquiries about specific forests.

There is an Artists' Talk on 16 May, 4:00 - 6:00pm. Tim Collins and Reiko Goto will host an open discussion about their work and the role of art in relationship to a changing environment.

John Newling's works explore the natural world and the social and economic systems of society, such as money or religion. He belongs to a generation of artists whose work evolved from Conceptual Art, Land Art and Arte Povera – art movements occurring during the 1960s, that placed emphasis on the concept, process and site of the work, alongside material and aesthetic properties. Ecologies of Value is Newling’s first major survey exhibition and presents a selection of his work from the 1970s to the present day.

The first section of the exhibition plays with ideas relating to money and religion. The second section features new artworks inspired by the natural world and its ecological systems.

John Newling, An Eclipse between Coin and Leaf (Jersey Kale) 2011-12. Courtesy of the artist, from nottinghamcontemporary.org

Piero Gilardi was an influential figure in the development of Arte Povera (poor art) in Italy in the late 1960s centred in Turin. From the outset, he was concerned with creating social relations through art. Collaborative Effects tracks Gilardi’s approach to collaboration within and outside the art world over a 22-year period from 1963 to 1985 through his interactive sculptures and his creative work with social and political movements. It brings both these stories up-to-date through the inclusion of recent sculptures and work relating to anti-austerity and environmental campaigns in Italy.

Collaborative Effects reveals the significant role Gilardi played in the development of the Italian and international avant garde of the late 1960s and 70s. It also reveals him as an important precursor of participatory and socially-engaged art practices today.

The exhibition begins with Gilardi’s early sculpture – interactive sculptures based on natural motifs, including his celebrated Nature Carpets. Gilardi’s Nature Carpets are highly colourful, realistic sculptures of slices of nature made from carved and painted foam.

Games People Play Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World (CCANW) Haldon Forest, near Exeter, Devon 6 October 2012 – 24 February 2013

CCANW’s year-long Games People Play programme will explore what games can tell us about ‘human nature’, and how a deeper understanding of the advantages of cooperation can help us all to address the needs of the planet.

Indoors, the exhibitions will be presented in two halves. The first will show a selection of early board games which were intended as guides to moral improvement or general knowledge. It will include documentation of unusual local games, past and present. The second half will focus on photography and video by contemporary artists which use sporting imagery, and will focus on the new generation of video games designed to address social and environmental challenges.

Both halves will include participatory and interactive work including performances of H.G.Wells’ ‘Little Wars’ and Guy Debord’s ‘The Game of War’, and demonstrations of cooperative games of the 1970s.

Outside, games will be devised and played in a ‘playground’ area in front of CCANW’s building, along the trails and in the wider forest environment.

Five villages surrounding Haldon will be working with The Moveable Feast Workshop Company, inventing new games as well as researching the heritage of local games. Additional activities include Fluxolympics–inspired and Paralympics events and a letterboxing challenge on Haldon similar to that played on Dartmoor.

Biodiversity and interdependence will also be explored through activities led by artists and wildlife experts in Haldon Forest, a Site of Special Scientific Interest due to the presence of birds of prey, Nightjars and 30 species of butterfly.

The title of the programme takes its name from Eric Berne’s book ‘Games People Play’, first published in 1964.

Frozen Relic: Arctic Works is a series of re-fabricated real world scenarios by designer/makers ScanLAB Projects. Using millimetre perfect 3D scanning technology ScanLAB stage and capture transitory moments on location across the world. In the Frozen Relic: Arctic Works series these moments are digitally archived and reproduce out of context and out of time.

Whilst working with Cambridge University aboard the Greenpeace Icebreaker ‘The Arctic Sunrise’, ScanLab documented a series of ice floes in the Fram Strait North West of Svalbard, Norway. During the course of two expeditions to the Arctic the team captured a total of 26 floes in forensic detail, mapping their surfaces, analysing core samples of the ice and mapping their drift through the fluxing ice pack.

Frozen Relic: Arctic Works temporarily recreates this landscape in the AA Gallery in its natural material - frozen saltwater. Each piece is a digitally fabricated scale replica of the original ice floe which was 3D scanned from above and documented using underwater sonar from below. The completed digital survey model is used to guide a cnc robotic arm, which carves the moulds in which each replica is cast. The replicas float in the Gallery space, with eye level replacing sea level.

This multi-disciplinary showcase examines how bamboo has been appropriated in a context of space, in place-making and within the process of establishing national boundaries. Each project explores cross-cultural interaction and linkages forged through material and spatial syntax in the formation of cultural codes and future identities across borderlines.

Parallel Horizons stems from Baasher Ghor / Bamboo House, an international collaborative platform bringing together 35 practitioners from four continents including architects, artists, designers, sculptors, photographers and oral historians with the aim of rediscovering stories and narratives misplaced through human migration and interpolation.

This exhibition brings together work by twelve artists who have traveled to and spent time in the Galápagos archipelago through a residency programme initiated in 2007. Each artist found the experience transformative for their artistic practice and their life.

Collectively they demonstrate considerable variety of approach and discipline within the visual arts, ranging across film-making, video, installation, painting, sculpture, photography, animation, illustration and sound. The artists also brought to the project, and developed during it, considerable skills of communication and interaction with scientists, tourists, and local inhabitants of the Galápagos, allowing them to explore subjects of scientific or social interest consistent with their artistic concerns.

'Materiality is one of those words that comes up all the time in contemporary art, and at the Ottoneum musuem it really was everywhere: seeds, water, bark, dirt, fossil fuel. Toril Johannessen’s looming magic lantern ran on petroleum. Claire Pentecost had created 'soil-erg,' an alternative currency, out of compost. The stacked ingots of dried mud didn’t seem that crazy considering that only that afternoon Spain’s government had requested a hundred billion euros from the EU to stay solvent.'

Apples and dogs feature in this year's exhibition.. appearing in 'a series of paintings of apples by Korbinian Aigner, a Bavarian village pastor who created a new strain of apple while imprisoned in Dachau and Sachsenhausen concentration camps and went on to document various kinds of apple and pear in 900 postcard-sized paintings, all observed, standardised and numbered with conceptualist rigour.'

'Anna Maria Maiolino’s piece in the Auepark was similarly disconcerting. The Brazilian artist has filled a small house on the edge of the Auepark with plants and smoothly coiled clay and has supplemented the birdsong round about with the more exotic sound of birds from her South American homeland. From that point on, all birdsong in the park seemed exaggerated, as if a chorus had been staged for the particular benefit of visitors.'

Documenta 13 is impressive in its scope. Yet it left me with a feeling of unease. How big is the carbon footprint of an exhibition on this scale? And do the event’s extraordinarily high production values not blunt its critical edge? Can an exhibition bank-rolled by so many state institutions all over the world, not to mention an unedifying collection of corporate sponsors, ever really bite the hand that feeds it?'

Pertaining to Things Natural… The Chelsea Physic Garden, London 10 July – 31 October 2012

This outdoor sculpture exhibition presents monumental sculptural works, ephemeral land art projects and delicate interventions by over twenty leading artists.

Curated by David Worthington, Vice President of the Royal British Society of Sculptors, Pertaining to Things Natural… takes its name from the 17th century definition of ‘physic’ and is a reminder of the Physic Garden’s founding mission as a place for the study of useful plants, especially those used in medicines.

The exhibition takes place throughout the entire site, with works installed in greenhouses, the café, the entrance lobby and the composting area, as well as the garden itself.

The Future’s Not What It Used To Begroup exhibition, curated by Deborah SmithChapter Arts Centre
Market Rd, Canton, Cardiff CF5 1QE21 September - 4 November 2012

The Future’s Not What It Used To Be is an exhibition of ten international artists who explore the concepts of past, present and future. Using a range of media, the artists present multiple perspectives of their changing landscape, helping viewers to define and redefine their own relationships to the world.

Susan Hiller, Vernon Ah Kee and Tony Albert give voice to indigenous cultures in the hope that we learn from the past; Marjetica Portc and Monika Sosnowska’s architectural and sculptural works investigate the poetics and politics of space; Amie Siegel and Jeremy Millar explore how events in history resonate with our understanding and experience of the present; Patricia Piccinini engages us with the changing nature of our environment; Darren Almond and Matt Bryans mark, manipulate and erase time.

Annie Cattrell trained as a sculptor and her work is informed by her interest in neuroscience, anatomy and meteorology, the fusion between science and art. She works in a variety of media but is drawn to glass because of its transparency and through it she captures the rhythms of the natural world, moments in time, fleeting things, clouds on a particular day, the delicacy of the human lung.

Works on display include Conditions which comprises twelve individual sculptures, representing a variety of cloud types in difference sky strata between January to December in and around the UK and Currents which depicts the ever-changing surface of the sea and its response to wind intensity from above and undercurrent movement from below.

The human organ of oxygen, the lungs, was produced by blowing air into molten borosilicate glass normally used for making laboratory test tubes to form the intricate dendritic formation of the human lungs.

In June, artist and architect Helen Stratford spent a day with a Muscovy duck on Ely’s Riverside researching how public areas are shared between human and duck. The day formed a starting point for conversations and encounters with city residents, visitors, tourists and workers whose paths interact with the public spaces that adjoin the riverside.

Ely is in the midst of change - currently undergoing a masterplanning process of ‘planned growth’ to ‘maintain the city’s unique identity.’

In contrast, A Day With A Duck explores alternate and unplanned ways through which places are generated.

There is a public programme of interactive live-art events in collaboration with invited artists, local people and wildlife: 15 September: a day long series of Live Art events will take over areas of Ely. The events include One Minute Birdwatching by Holly Rumble and Ring This Bell by Townley and Bradby. The public is invited to bring along Super 8 duck related footage to a Live Duck Shoot by Helen Stratford and Cambridge Super 8 group outside Babylon Gallery. Special guest, Avril Hayter-Smith: Ely's Official Town Crier, will open the day with The Duck Proclamation.

The exhibition That Oceanic Feeling brings together new works in different media by British artist Rona Lee, developed in dialogue with geoscientists at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, whose research involves mapping the deep sea, the least understood and accessible environment on the planet.

That Oceanic Feeling explores our complex symbolic relationship to this emergent political and economic landscape asking what it might mean to look into this otherwise dark space.

The John Hansard Gallery will host a free, one-day symposium exploring related ideas on 13 October.

The poetic names of older varieties of apple trees, many of which are now endangered - such as Embroidered Apple, Hoary Morning and Swan’s Egg - are the basis for a new set of collaborative works by the poet Gerry Loose and the artist Donald Urquhart.

Starting with a selection of Victorian engravings, Loose has added a text inspired by old descriptions of apples grown in Scotland. Each annotated engraving is set alongside a block of colour by Urquhart, drawn from a spectrum of the tones of fully ripe fruit.

Orchard is simultaneously a lament for the loss of varieties and a celebration of that rich variety.

Môr Plastig is Welsh for 'plastic sea' and is a photographic study of plastic objects washed up on a small beach, Cwm Gwyllog, in North Pembrokeshire, Wales. Photographs from the series will be exhibited by the Unseen Gallery, Amsterdam, at their Photo Fair.

This Cape Farewell exhibition encompasses biodiversity, atmospherics and oceanography — earth, wind and sea. Five artists who have worked with climate scientists exhibit their artworks alongside the scientific enquiry.

This exhibition, opening in the week of the centenary of Alan Turing's birth, will focus on the interrelationship of text code and visual image. Artists featured include John Cayley, Paolo Cirio, and Jacques Donguy, Eduardo Kac, William Latham, Liliane Lijn, Alessandro Ludovico, heath bunting.

Two artists' work connects with biological 'coding'.

Eduardo Kac shows a new work, CODA, the culmination of a series called Edunia, within which Kac hybridised his own DNA with plant DNA, to form a new transgenic, 'bioart', work. Kac will also display a work-in-progress which connects bio-conductive ink, silk-screening, MBED circuits and a sound score developed with Dr Rob Toulson of the Anglia Ruskin CoDE Research centre.

"In 1997 I had what I refer to as my oil epiphany. It occurred to me that the vast, human-altered landscapes that I pursued and photographed for over twenty years were only made possible by the discovery of oil…"
- Edward Burtynsky

Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky chronicles the effects of oil and reveals the rarely seen mechanics of its production and distribution.

From aerial views of oil fields and highways ribboning across the landscape, to derelict oil derricks and mammoth oil-tanker shipbreaking operations, the exhibition confronts the viewer with the evidence of dependence on this finite resource.

The Galápagos archipelago uniquely exemplifies the delicate tension between a pristine environment and human curiosity and intervention. Over 5 years, 12 artists visited these islands returning home with film footage, drawings, photographs, sculptures, sounds and imaginings. The resulting exhibition at Liverpool's the Bluecoat offers an insight into the cultural reality, the human stories and the living laboratory of Galápagos.

The exhibition is curated by Bergit Arends, curator of contemporary arts at the Natural History Museum, London, and Greg Hilty, curatorial director at the Lisson Gallery, London; it is produced by Angela McSherry.

kennardphillipps is an artist collaboration forged between Peter Kennard and Cat Phillipps during the build-up to the US/UK invasion of Iraq in 2002. The two artists work together to create pieces that confront political and corporate power in solidarity with the social movements that form in resistance against state and commercial oppression. Each piece is adapted to exist in various environments: in galleries, on the street, for publication in print and on the internet.

Occupy Everything centres on their work relating to the global protests and occupations which were widespread in 2011, with a large proportion of it having been already used on the street. Photographs and documentation showing the work in action will also be exhibited.

Cape Farewell's U-N-F-O-L-D exhibition features the work of twenty-five artists who have participated in the Cape Farewell expeditions in 2007 and 2008 to the High Arctic and in 2009 to the Andes.

The exhibition will overlap with Cape Farewell's university shortcourse/uk programme. shourcourse/uk provides unconventional psycho-geographic tours inquiring the role of ecology and environment in the education of contemporary artists.

HEVVA! HEVVA! showcases artwork by 21 emerging artists and designers from across University College Falmouth. This exhibition represents their creative response to three days' expeditions made around the landscapes of Cornwall as part of Cape Farewell’s SHORTCOURSE/UK.

The title, HEVVA! HEVVA!, encapsulates the spirit of the journey the party made in an attempt to engage with the localised effects of climate change. The Cornish word 'hevva' recalls the roar once heard from the cliffs of Cornwall where a 'huer' on spotting a shoal of pilchards bluing the sea would call loudly to the fishermen.

An exclamation, a halloo from way off, but, too, a premonitory warning cry, HEVVA! HEVVA! frames a collection of artworks, text and performance that share a common genesis in place and environment, which in chorus looks to communicate an urgent message.

The three days of journeying encouraged a psycho-geographical approach to investigating human relationships with both urban and natural landscapes. At each leg of the expedition students were joined by a number of specially invited artists, geographers, oceanographers and botanists.

Social Fabric
Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts)
Rivington Place, London EC2A 3BA 19 January - 10 March

Social Fabric focuses on the textile industry and its relation to capital, labour, colonialism, international trade and radical politics. The exhibition examines the social and economic role of textiles, particularly in India.

Its starting point are works by artists Alice Creischer about the circulation of global commodities and by Sudhir Patwardhan who records the impact of the textile industry on Mumbai. Other artists are Celine Condorelli, Archana Hande, Raqs Media Collective, and Andreas Siekmann.

The exhibition refers to Karl Marx's account of boom and bust in the industry and its effects on workers in Britain and India. The craze for Indian Chintz caused Spitalfields weavers to protest in 1719, and a century later the restrictions on imports devastated India's textile industry.

photo: Apparatus for the Osmotic Compensation of the Pressure of Wealth during the Contemplation of Poverty, by Alice Creischer. photo by Thierry Bal

The London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT) partnered with Artsadmin as part of the IMAGINE 2020 network to commission and present a new public art work in central London by artist Michael Pinsky that responds to climate change.

The piece was launched 7 February 2012 and continues through 4 March.

Plunge is a set of 3 blue led-light rings placed on the Seven Dials Sundial Pillar, the Duke of York Column and the Paternoster Square Column. Each indicates the water level of the Thames, in one thousand years, should climate change go unchecked.

The fear of place and the manifestation of this in contemporary art is the territory for TOPOPHOBIA. As an anxiety disorder, this phobia is understood as an irrational dread of certain places or situations, yet, considered as a cultural phenomenon, topophobia connects us to the existential human question of how each of us finds our place in the world. The exhibition and related publication take a look at the representation of place and space as threatened or threatening.

A Conversation Between Trees Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World (CCANW) Haldon Forest, near Exeter, Devon 22 October 2011 - 29 January 2012

Visualisation looking up at the canopy of a mango tree in the Mata Atlantica, Brazil

The exhibition by Active Ingredient, following their residency at CCANW, reveals the invisible forces at play in forests, displayed as a series of data maps generated live in the gallery space. Large video projections will show trees from Brazil and the UK ‘in conversation’ - revealing the light, colour and climate in the canopy of trees, changing over time.

Environmental sensors and mobile phones are placed in the canopy of trees in each of the forests and data sent to the gallery via a mobile phone. A machine also interprets the scientific data, scorching sheets of paper with circular graphs that tell the story of 70 years of climate and environmental change.

At the Opening, Refreshments. Active Ingredient discuss the exhibition with Carlo Buontempo, Senior Climate Change Consultant at the Met Office.

Ghosts of Gone Birds features over 200 new works from artists as diverse as Sir Peter Blake, Ralph Steadman, Charming Baker, Rob Ryan and Kai & Sunny. Each of the 120 artists, writers and musicians has adopted an extinct species.

The exhibition is intended to bring artistic life back to the bird species that have been lost, and to raise money for BirdLife International's Preventing Extinctions programme.

In addition to the visual arts, there is live printing, talks, readings and performances. There is a series of Ghosts stories that shed light on the conservation work being done around the world to prevent any further species extinctions.

Autoconstrucción: The Optimistic Failure of a Simultaneous PromiseAbraham CruzvillegasModern Art Oxford to 20 November 2011

Modern Art Oxford presents a major exhibition of new work by Mexican artist Abraham Cruzvillegas. The artist is best known for his long-standing project, Autoconstrucción, in which he takes inspiration from the eclectic and improvisatory architecture of his childhood home in the area of Pedregales de Coyoacán, Mexico City.

Autoconstrucción operates as a metaphor for individual identity and the identity of a place existing in a state of flux. Cruzvillegas’ project is informed by ideas of ‘survival economics’ – how scarceness can lead to recycling and solidarity in opposition to consumption and individualism.

Over the last year, Cruzvillegas has explored aspects of Oxford and its history, including associations with science, literature, magic, ethnography, imperialism and politics to propose works that combine aspects of the local with his highly personal and poetic visual language.

The Animal Gaze Returned
London Metropolitan University27 October - 11 November 2011

The Animal Gaze Returned addresses contemporary art and animals. The focus of the exhibition is on animality and the active social space between and among different species; on new representations of other animals in what is termed a post-critical era; and on animal as medium in contemporary art.

The first public art exhibition held simultaneously across eight countries in Europe focuses on relations between art, science and society. As the UK representative, Anne Brodie, presents her artwork, BEE BOX, for the first time.

The BEE BOX reminds us of the invisible disappearance of our
pollinators. Bees, like us, form communities of workers capable of generating intelligent social interactions. Brodie offers a poetic reflection on the fragility of these communities.

The project is organised by the European Public Art Centre (EPAC), a collaborative engagement between organisations across Europe with the aim to exhibit art-science artworks in urban outdoor public settings. The other countries are Latvia, Finland, Portugal, Spain, Iceland, Estonia and Poland.

In 2006/07 Anne was awarded an Antarctic international fellowship sponsored by the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and Arts Council England, and spent 3 months working in the Antarctic. She continues her creative investigation on the human/environmental interface with scientists at BAS and the University of Surrey.

Tarnished Earth is a street exhibition of photographs by Jiri Rezac showing North American wilderness, the environmental consequences of human actions, and sources for alternative forms of energy. The photographs tell the story of the Canadian tar sands oil extraction.

In the Event of Flooding Elizabeth Willow High Tide libraries on Merseyside 1 - 30 June

During a High Tide residency at FACT in Liverpool in 2009, Elizabeth Willow gathered 90 responses from visitors to the 'Climate for Change' exhibition. The responses are presented as a set of four books.

The books are exhibited at the Allerton, Lea Valley and Wavertree libraries in
Liverpool and the Bebington, Birkenhead Central, Wallasey and West Kirby libraries on the Wirral

Cubitt Gallery presents Spaghetti Junctions, the first UK solo exhibition by Swiss artists Christina Hemauer and Roman Keller. Through video, sculptural-recreation, text and archive material the artists explore two short-lived experiments with solar energy, both marking points of change or crisis in the history of oil consumption.

Sun of 1913 (2009) looks back to the first commercial-scale solar power plant, built in 1913, in Egypt under British mandate, by American engineer Frank Shuman. For a short period solar was the most economical form of power generation, cheaper than shipping coal from Britain. However, the plant ceased operation after one year, when at the onset of World War I the British Government began mass-scale crude oil production in Iran, precipitating a widespread turn to oil. The fate of Shuman’s solar plant is told through a narrative written with Egyptian writer Wageh George. A video projection shows two segments of the plant being reconstructed in Cairo by the artists and craftsmen.

A Curiosity, a Museum Piece and an Example of a Road not Taken (2006-2007) investigates former American president Jimmy Carter’s pioneering but ultimately futile energy programme. It culminated in his symbolic solar installation on the White House roof during the 1979 energy crisis, which was removed by the Ronald Regan administration.

At Water's Edge Environmental Photographer of the Year 2009 - 2010 EDGEspace, Liverpool
22 February - 19 March 2011

The Environmental Photographer of the Year is an international showcase for the best in environmental photography. At Water's Edge is an exclusive exhibition of images selected from the 2009 and 2010 Environmental Photographer of the Year submissions.

EDGEspace, High Tide's new venue for eco-culture in the North West of England, opened on 21 January 2011. It promotes Experimental Dialogues for Generating Eco-culture. Located in the Ropewalks district of Liverpool city centre, EDGEspace aims to be a hub of creative activity around ethical, environmental and ecological issues.

Dominion Peninsula Arts, University of Plymouth, Devon22 January - 5 March 2011

Drawing on the overarching symbol of the whale, Dominion is a multilayered and allusive attempt to come to terms with a shared history between human and whale. It incorporates Angela Cockayne’s chimerical objects and Philip Hoare’s text. The result is an aesthetic sermon on the state of the whale and the world.

A Memorial for the Still Living
Beatriz da Costa
Horniman Museum & Gardens, London 2 October 2010 to 9 January 2011

Beatriz da Costa presents A Memorial for the Still Living, a sombre reflection on endangered species in an installation which confronts visitors with the reality of British species threatened with extinction. Da Costa’s focus is on the ‘still living’: species that have been classified as being under threat, but which still stand a chance for survival if immediate action is taken.

Artist's talk: 25 November 2010 from 7:00 - 9:30 pm
Beatriz da Costa discusses the inspiration and processes involved in creating A Memorial for the Still Living and leads a tour of the exhibition.

To coincide with the exhibition, da Costa has released the Endangered Species Finder, a mobile application that helps you to locate, identify, and submit sightings of endangered species in the UK.

Behind the Dawn is an exhibition accompanied by events, performances and workshops celebrating the International Year of Biodiversity.

The exhibitions
are:

Evaporation, by Jana Winderen – film and sound environment recordings 25 metres under the ice of Greenland and inside the ice itself
Cell biology microscopy, x-ray chrystalography and scanning electron microscopy photography by The University of Edinburgh
Midwinter, Close Reflection, Water Wind and Light - films by James Hawkins
Paintings Inspired By Nature – an aesthetic interpretation of a microscopic world by Hamer Dodds, scientist

Artists Lucy + Jorge Orta joined the Cape Farewell expedition to the Peruvian Amazon rainforest in July 2009. Working closely with the Manú Biosphere Reserve in Peru, with scientists from the Environmental Change Institute, Oxford, and with the Natural History Museum's collections, the artists developed Amazonia, an exhibition of sculpture, photography and video for the Jerwood Gallery.

Curated by Sally Payen, Next Nature is part of iNTERTEXT’s program of international artists’ installations that began with Uncivilisation at The Dark Mountain Project Festival in Llangollen in May this year.

This exhibition explores the duality between the idealised nature we dream about and the changing nature brought about by humankind’s interference, the rising of a next nature, which is wild and unpredictable as ever. .

Building Green explores issues around sustainability and food production and consists of three new commissions by major artists, Amy Franceschini / Myriel Milicevic (Futurefarmers), Rebecca Beinart and Nils Norman.

These artists / provocateurs use their work to channel concerns about the need to sustain a global ecological balance using seemingly commonplace processes such as gardening, building and food production.

Each Artist is using the environment of Loughborough University as the platform for their work. FutureFarmers are cultivating a plot of land. Beinart is finding and using natural yeasts that exist around the campus and town, and Norman is creating a permanent structure from recycled materials.

All three pieces will develop over the summer and come to fruition in October 2010.

Hydrarchy: Power and Resistance at Sea Gasworks, London 18 September - 7 November 2010

Hydrarchy: Power and Resistance at Sea is a group exhibition that approaches historical and contemporary examinations of the sea and the offshore as contested cultural, political, legal and socio-economic territories. Focusing on specific events, situations and mythologies attached to past and recent maritime history, the works address power relations at sea and the forms of resistance and survival developed as a response.

The exhibition brings together artists whose work explores themes encompassing colonialism and the slave trade, commerce, sea tourism and offshore finance, as well as maritime folk history, piracy and the proverbially tyrannical figure of the captain. While not always explicitly referenced in the works, the ship, as the ultimate container and enabler of these activities, histories and relations, stands as the unifying element of the exhibition.

Ambulation is an exhibition, series of events, films and new commissions by artists and architects who use walking as an artistic practice.

The series of newly commissioned tours explore the city of Plymouth through its histories; and unseen, distinctive anomalies. The intention of Ambulation is that the exhibition of ephemera, commissions and documentation along with the projects will help to develop a conversation on walking and the city over the period of the exhibition.

In collaboration with the people of Igloolik, Kinngait, Iqaluit, Mittimatalik and Kanngiqtugaapik in Nunavut, Canada, artists and architects are devising a mobile media and living unit, powered by renewable energy sources, to be used by Inuit and other Arctic peoples for creative media production, communications and monitoring the environment, while moving, living and working on the land.

The Arctic Perspective Initiative is an international collaborative partnership between Projekt Atol, C-TASC, HMKV, The Arts Catalyst and Lorna. It is led by artists Marko Peljhan and Matthew Biederman. The exhibition at Canada House is curated by The Arts Catalyst.

The exhibition at the Phoenix Halle, Dortmund, Germany, is curated by HMKV in the framework of European Capital of Culture RUHR 2010 and the international media-art conference ISEA 2010.

This ARTIST ROOMS exhibition contains a selection of the work of Joseph Beuys (1921 - 1986), one of the most influential figures in post-war European Art.

The exhibition includes a number of vitrines, including the legendary 'Fat Chair', a selection of drawings and an iconic portrait of Beuys by Andy Warhol.

ARTIST ROOMS is a new collection of international contemporary art created through a gift made by Anthony d’Offay, with the assistance of the National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF), The Art Fund and the Scottish and British Governments. ARTIST ROOMS is jointly owned and managed by National Galleries of Scotland and Tate on behalf of the nation.

The principle of ARTIST ROOMS is the concept of individual rooms devoted to particular artists.

Turbulences
a moved wind exhibition
near Hesse, Germany
15 - 29 August 2010

This year's exhibition by bewegter-wind (moved wind) is on the theme of 'Turbulence', and will be held on locations around Hesse Germany.

Artists working with wind objects, installations, performances and landart have been selected from a competition.

From the exhibition organisers:

Turbulences are meetings of unordered currents. A dynamic turbulence is the swirling of a current in the meteorological and in the metaphorical sense. They stand for fast changing situations. This is also a metaphor for the aspects of the communication of winds in the the world. Turbulences can be both: a threat and a chance, upswing or crash.

moved wind have, since 2004, held annual exhibitions of wind art.

'Wind is the only element, which is not visible and is only noticed through the relationship with the other elements. It is a phenomenon and a symbol for spirit. Each landscape is shaped by it, each culture is affected by it. Its play with high and low pressure is a metaphor for communication in the back and forth of the winds of the world. These various aspects of an invisible phenomenon occupies artists world-wide'

This group exhibition examines the parameters of human and animal characteristics and question the evolution of the human race.

Some of the work blurs the boundaries between nostalgia and abhorrence, referencing the use of animals in the entertainment industry, whilst other work references animals in heraldic, mythological stories. Conventions in visual art practice are also deliberated, highlighting the inter-dependence of living beings in a contemporary world, these range from the allegorical use of animals in traditional regal portraiture to other works that alter our perception of sculpture by fusing animal imagery with mass produced objects.

The exhibition can be seen as reflective of our increasingly uneasy relationship with the natural world that is tainted with confusion, contradiction and confrontation and will oscillate between the playful, sinister, surreal and controversial.

A group exhibition, Uneven Geographies brings together artists who aim to represent the fabric of lives affected by global flows, rather than capturing the instant, sensational journalistic image. Whether using film, installation or sculpture, or experimenting with maps, flow-charts and diagrams, all aim to make the networks of power, profit and exploitation very visible.

New Wooabbeleri is an analysis of how the local conurbation of Thamesmead received its name, and by implication, how large developments sometimes rely on chance and spurious encounters, as much as clearly defined parameters and plans.

Stuart Whipps became interested in the history of Thamesmead after investigating its uncertain origins. Known in its early days as 'The Woolwich-Erith Riverside Project', it needed a clearly identifiable moniker, so a 'name the new town' competition was launched in November 1966. In all, there were 565 entries and 'Thamesmead' was finally chosen in March 1967.

The site which remains the largest geographical location designated for regeneration in Europe. The project aims to address how sometimes random and indiscriminate historical facts can affect the imagination of local communities. It suggests that, if certain plans are always open to interpretation, then perhaps it's responsible for each of us to try and take control of how our environment is shaped, and be actively involved in injecting our surroundings with meaning and potential for the future.

Ed Kashi is known worldwide for his outstanding photojournalism and his commitment to documenting social and political issues. The exhibition of his work in the Niger Delta presents photographs included in the newly published Curse of the Black Gold.

As part of Shaping the Future, a PLATFORM residency at the Stephen Lawrence Centre, Ed Kashi will be running a hands-on workshop on the ‘photo-essay’ for young people. For more information on this, email Ben Amunwa at Remember Saro-Wiwa.

This exhibition is the first survey of Marcus Coates’ work in a public gallery in the UK and it includes early film pieces, sculpture, sound, costumes and photographs as well as new work.

Coates often assumes the identity of an animal, such as a fox, goshawk or stoat, by simulating its appearance, enacting its habits and appropriating its language. In the film, Stoat (1999), for example, Coates totters around on ramshackle platforms, learning to recreate the animals’ bounding movements; in Goshawk (1999), a telephoto lens captures the artist as a rare bird perched precariously at the top of a tree; while in Finfolk (2003), the artist emerges from the North Sea spluttering a new dialect, as spoken by seals.

Coates has also trained as a shaman and the exhibition includes films of his rituals, where he achieves a trance-like state and communes with the animal kingdom to address social issues. photograph: Marcus Coates, Vision quest, Ernie, 2009, by Nick David

Presented as part of the International Year of Biodiversity, the show presents the outcome of the artist’s study of deformed amphibians in the UK, commissioned by The Arts Catalyst and Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

The National Gallery of Denmark, Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art, Nikolaj Copenhagen Contemporary Art Center, and the Alexandra Institute join together in RETHINK - Contemporary Art and Climate Change an international contemporary art exhibition showing diverse perspective on the climate debate.

The exhibition, part of the official culture programme for the United Nations Climate Change Conference COP15, includes artists whose work relates to the intersection between art, culture and climate change.

The four exhibitions are:

The RETHINK website includes essays and blogs on rethinking politics, nature, art, social life, technology and borders.

Earth Art of a Changing World Royal Academy of Arts and GSK Contemporary 3 December 2009 - 31 January 2010

A collaboration between the Royal Academy of Art and GSK Contemporary 2009 (sponsored by GlaxoSmithKline), Earth Art of a Changing World sets out to consider the impact of climate change on the practice of a broad range of contemporary artists, working in a wide-variety of media. Some of the artists featured are involved in the issue directly. For others, it has an indirect resonance with their work.

The sections of the exhibition are:

Introduction
An introduction to the key factors that make up the natural world our cultural relationship to earth’s stability, the section includes Works by Ackroyd & Harvey, Spencer Finch, Mona Hatoum and Marcos Lutyens & Alessandro Marianantoni.

Perceived Reality
Showing representations of the world as we imagine it today, the section includes works by Antti Laitinen and Edward Burtynsky.

Artist as Explorer and Reflector
At the centre of the exhibition, this section is about the role of the artist as communicator, reflector and interpreter of key issues of their day. The artists include Sophie Calle, Lucy & Jorge Orta, Cornelia Parker, the poet Lemn Sissay and Shiro Takatani.

Destruction
This section will consider the consequences of human behaviour through natural disasters and physical collapse, counterpoising the beauty of the planet with the damage that is being inflicted upon it.

The New (Reality)
This section shows how the world and the sense of beauty is being re-defined by the impact of climate change.
This change has fostered new notions of care and empathy for habitats, for bio-diversity and a new sense of a shared emotional understanding. Artists include the writer, Ian McEwan, Mariele Neudecker and Emma Wieslander.

Dark Places uncovers sites of secrecy and technology across Britain. Commissioned by The Arts Catalyst and co-curated with the Office of Experiments, SCAN and the John Hansard Gallery, the exhibition presents new artists' works that explore spaces and institutions below the radar of common knowledge.

The Office of Experiments' (OOE) Overt Research Project sets a background by mapping and recording advanced labs and facilities that are unwittingly or purposefully concealed from public view. OOE also brings together The Mike Kenner Archive, revealing years of campaigning by one man into the public biochemical warfare experiments conducted by Porton Down (Salisbury).

Victoria Halford and Steve Beard's film Voodoo Science Park traces a secret geography of the Health and Safety Laboratory in Derbyshire, where train crashes and industrial accidents are re-created to examine their destructive pathways. The film imagines a delayed encounter between poet William Blake and political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, drawing affinities to this unique site.

Beatriz da Costa's A Memorial for the Still Living is a sombre reflection on endangered species of the British Isles. Presenting a selection of rare animal, insect and reptile specimens, including loans from the Natural History and Horniman Museums, da Costa identifies these collections and the bleak future they imply as 'dark places' of zoological science.

Steve Rowell, a collaborator with the US-based group the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), in his solo project Ultimate High Ground UK, uncovers shared US-UK spaces of military power. Realised as a multiscreen video installation, the work focuses upon RAF Menwith Hill, North Yorkshire, a satellite ground station and
communications intercept site, known for its distinctive radome structures.

The Eden Project and Cape Farewell present the premiere of Beth Derbyshire's film work, Anthem, with music by composer Ulrike Haage. Anthem is a trilogy of films with a choral component, exploring notions of land, place and nation.

Anthem assembles ideas around nationality, identity and language using the symbols of landscape and song to explore our cultural relationship to landscape. Song and landscape have long been associated with expressions on nation. Derbyshire borrows from sources such as national anthems, ancient land names and etymology to capture cultural and natural settings, to explore the connections between people and landscape through balancing components of voice, music, word and image.

Anthem was filmed in Newfoundland, the UK and in the Arctic during the Cape Farewell research expedition of 2007.

Nostalgia
by Omer Fast
South London Gallery
7 October - 6 December 2009

Judgement Day struck in 1980 and the world has been mired in a second Dark Ages since. Northern Europe is a wasteland and Britain has become a barren backwater where nomadic tribes roam across the dunes and raid one another for depleted resources. The only steady export from this once fabled island are migrants, who desperately stream across the European mainland in hope of a more peaceful and prosperous future in Africa.

The South London Gallery presents 'Nostalgia', a three-part film installation by Omer Fast. One film depicts a migrant from a dystopian Britain seeking asylum in Africa. Adapted from a true story, this narrative is presented alongside an extract of original footage and a dramatisation of an encounter between the artist and a person seeking asylum in Britain. In a third story, in a west African colony increasingly hostile to Britons seeking a better life, an asylum-seeker is interrogated as to the whereabouts of a tunnel used to smuggle people into the colony. He is offered a deal by the authorities and must choose between betraying his friends and securing his future.

Fast's film and video work, often shown as installations on multiple screens, takes contemporary issues or historic moments as their points of departure, meshing narrative, documentary and dramatic content.

'Nostalgia' is co-produced by the South London Gallery; the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; and the Verein der Freunde der Nationalgalerie, Berlin.

This major exhibition of work by the influential artist and activist Gustav Metzger, examines his life-long exploration of politics, ecology and the destructive powers of 20th-century society. Metzger’s career has spanned over 60 years and this is the most extensive survey of his work to be shown in the UK.

The exhibition draws together the themes and methodologies that have informed the London-based artist’s practice from 1959 until the present day. The broad cross-section of works on view include Metzger’s auto-destructive and auto-creative works of the 1960s, such as his pioneering liquid crystal projections; the ongoing Historic Photographs series, which responds to major events and catastrophes; and later works exploring ecological issues, globalisation and commercialisation.

Film footage of seminal performances and actions are exhibited, as well as a new, participative installation using the archive of newspapers Metzger has been collecting since 1995.

The exhibition and series of workshops by Lucy Orta
examines the social bonds within communities and the relationships between individuals and their environments.

The exhibition brings together sculptures, videos, objects, drawings and photographs created by Orta over the last ten years. Orta’s work reflects on themes including community and social inclusion; dwellings and mobility; and recycling and sustainable development. Conceptual in her approach, she is also innovative and experimental, creating modular and transformable objects such as wearable shelters, survival kits, giant dinner parties and mobile kitchens that are both functional and utopian.

Radical Nature: Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969–2009
Barbican Art Gallery, London 19 June - 18 October 2009

Radical Nature is the first exhibition to bring together key figures across different generations who have created utopian works and inspiring solutions for our ever-changing planet.

Radical Nature draws on ideas that have emerged out of Land Art, environmental activism, experimental architecture and utopianism. The exhibition is designed as one fantastical landscape, with each piece introducing into the gallery space a dramatic portion of nature.

Work by pioneering figures such as the architectural collective Ant Farm and visionary architect Richard Buckminster Fuller, artists Joseph Beuys, Agnes Denes, Hans Haacke and Robert Smithson are shown alongside pieces by a younger generation of practitioners including Heather and Ivan Morison, R&Sie(n), Philippe Rahm architects and Simon Starling.

Radical Nature also features specially commissioned and restaged historical installations, some of which are located in the outdoor spaces around the Barbican while a satellite project by the architectural collective EXYZT is situated off site.

Interspecies uses artistic strategies to stimulate dialogue about the way we view the relationship between human and non-human animals. All the artists in Interspecies question the one-sided manipulation of non-human life forms for art. They try instead to absorb the animal's point of view as a fundamental part of their work and practice.

There have been many examples in history of 'living art', where artists have manipulated the actions of swarms of bees, herded sheep, commanded dogs and sent rats down mazes. But can artists work with animals as equals? What does this mean to how we humans see ourselves as just one species inhabiting a planet in crisis?

The family day, Sunday 4 October, will give people a chance to see artists in contact with animals. Performance artist Kira O'Reilly will be Falling asleep with a pig, called Deliah, and Antony Hall's Enki Experiment 4 will invite visitors to communicate with an electric fish. During the afternoon, parents and children can take part in a series of free events:

Becoming Bowerbirds Children and parents are invited to be a bowerbird for the afternoon with artist Sally Hampson. Interspecies Tales Poet and storyteller Shamim Azad uses aspects of the Asian folk and oral traditions, with chant and body movement, poems, percussion instruments, tabla and songs.Animal Handler’s TalesBroadcaster and trainer of the owls used in the first Harry Potter movie, James Mackay talks about his work as 'The Animal Man' with exhibition curator Rob La Frenais.

It included artworks that made visible and tangible the outcomes of our actions at a local level, artworks conceived as social interventions, and artworks which arise out of a sustained dialogue between artists and scientists.

Amy Balkin Reading the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report
A public recital by volumteers and artists of the most recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Prayas Abhinav Petpuja A project on urban food systems in Bangalore and Delhi, exploring the nutritive, environmental and inter-personal implications that growing vegetables in the public can have on neighbourhoods.

Eva Meyer-Keller Handmade A film in which three different catastrophic weather scenarios are re-enacted with playful precision using household objects and materials such as a mixer, a hairdryer, salt and water.

With Climate for Change, FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) explored how humans can be invested in the change needed to sustain civilization and is examining the multiple crises affecting the world: ecological, financial, food, housing. Is society itself becoming unsustainable?

From FACT's website:

'The 21st century has finally hit and there is an energy in the air - how do you respond? Forget the eco-art and bring on local, national and international debates, actions, contexts, struggles and solutions'.

The Animal Gaze
Plymouth: Plymouth College of Art, Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery, Roland Levinsky Gallery Exeter: Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World (CCANW) 24 January - May 2009

Kate James, The World is a Dangerous Place

The Animal Gaze explored the complex relationships between animals and humans. The exhibition featured over 40 national and international artists whose works showed new approaches to animals, taking into account ethics, politics and aesthetics.

CCANW Animal Gaze film evening CCANW showed a special selection of short films and animations by 15 artists involved in the exhibition on 5 March. Artists featured included Roz Mortimer, Paul Bush, Suky Best and Tessa Farmer.

The Arts Catalyst exhibition, Interspecies: artists collaborating with animals consisted of new commissions and existing works by artists working closely with different species of animals, stimulated by the anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth.

All the artists questioned the one-sided manipulation of non-human life forms for art. They tried to absorb the animal's point of view as a fundamental part of their work and practice.

The newly commissioned works are by Nicolas Primat, Kira O'Reilly, Antony Hall and Ruth Maclennan. The other pieces are by Rachel Mayeri, Beatriz Da Costa and Kathy High.

Kira O'Reilly presented an action/installed performance featuring herself and a sleeping female pig. The work addressed the ethics of human and non-human animal interaction.

Antony Hall encouraged the public to directly communicate with live electric fish in the gallery space, through mild electrical impulses both tactile and visual.

Ruth Maclennan's 'The Department of Eagles' examined the relationship between falcons and falconers, and its association with human surveillance.

Two existing works were also shown in the touring exhibition: Rachel Mayeri's 'Primate Cinema', which casts human actors in the role of mating non-human primates; and Beatriz Da Costa's 'PigeonBlog' which investigates the military use of homing pigeons.

The exhibition opens at the Cornerhouse, Manchester, and will tour to Edinburgh, Northumberland and London.

The works in the exhibition considered the consequences of human actions; addressing, documenting and reflecting about climatic phenomena, as well as offering strategies and potential solutions including ideas for recycling and setting up closed systems.

In the film, a life-size replica of the interior of a McDonalds burger bar, without any customers or staff present, gradually floods with water. Furniture is lifted up by the water, trays of food and drinks start to float around, electrics short circuit and eventually the space becomes completely submerged.

This is the first solo exhibition by Superflex in in London. Over the past 15 years, Superflex's work has included large-scale installations, long-term process-based projects and, more recently, films.

The Fruits of Conversation was a community collaboration in which residents of Cambridge worked together to dissect local issues - using apples. In the spirit of his project Cutting the Melon, which documented how ordinary Venezuelans used melons to explain politics, Alan Warburton and his team asked Cambridge residents to do the same with local apples.

After a trip to an orchard to collect apples, the group (which included university geneticists, a food historian, community workers, civil servants and a police officer) were asked to cut, core and peel their apples to explain their opinions on a range of political topics.

The conversations were documented in detail by the artist, and the resulting exhibition displays video and photographic evidence of the process. The subject matter shows how Cambridge residents attempt to articulate the personality of a changing British city.

The Arts Catalyst and SCAN are presenting the results of new commissions from the artists Simon Hollington & Kypros Kyprianou and Chris Oakley, exploring the re-emerging concerns of nuclear power in the exhibition NUCLEAR: Art and Radioactivity.

The exhibition and events explore the contradictions of nuclear power, as it has come to stand both for the failed utopian promises of modernism and a fresh hope for a carbon-free future.

Simon Hollington & Kypros Kyprianou's installation is the outcome from their residency at the British Atomic Nuclear Group, with an emphasis on the work the artists did as part of the wide-ranging public consultation process into siting a new nuclear power facility in the heart of London.

An examination of nuclear science research through a historical and cultural filter, Chris Oakley's film 'Half-Life' looks at the histories of Harwell, birthplace of the UK nuclear industry, and the development of fusion energy technology at the Culham facility in Oxfordshire.

Two events are included:

A 'Talkaoke' event will be hosted by The People Speak 14 November at the Nicholls & Clarke building. A mobile chat-show, the format allows all visitors to comment on the work and the issues around it in an informal and entertaining way.

In partnership with the RSA’s Art & Ecology programme, The Arts Catalyst presents a day-long forum at the RSA on 28 November exploring the impact of nuclear power in art, culture and society. Prominent artists, writers and experts will discuss their work and engagement with issues around nuclear energy, from Hiroshima through the 50s’ ‘white heat of technology’ and Cold War nuclear tensions to present day energy debates. Speakers include the controversial American ‘nuclear sculptor’ James Acord.

The Animal Gaze
Unit 2 Gallery and Metropolitan Works
London, E1
18 November - 12 December 2008 then touring to the Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World; and the Plymouth City Museum & Gallery, Plymouth Arts Centre, Plymouth College of Art & Design and the Roland Levinsky Gallery.

The Animal Gaze features works by over 40 artists about animals and humans. The curators have chosen works which explore current themes in academic studies about the animal and the human, ideas about taxonomy, representation, difference and indifference. They have not included works which could be considered wildlife portraiture, or those that use animals as decoration or status symbols.

Accompanying the exhibition is The Animal Gaze: Contemporary Art & Animal/Human Studies, a symposium to be held at Sir John Cass Department of Art, Media & Design, London Metropolitan University, on 20 - 21 November. Places are limited. See the website for availability.

With this question seventeen international artists were sent into the Waterloopbos, a forest in the Netherlands which has grown over the ruins of the former Hydrodynamic Laboratory.

In the outdoor laboratory, hydraulic engineers worked for several decades to find technical solutions for hydrodynamic problems all over the world. Kielzog asked artists to work amongst the ruins of the scale models of the laboratory, amongst overgrown sluices, harbours and river courses, on a new view of the Dutch battle against the water, and a creative view of climate change.

The forest is managed by the Nature Monument Association (Natuurmonumenten) and is accessible to the public.

Of All the People in All the World 13 September - 5 October 2008
A.E. Harris Factory, Birmingham

In this exhibition by Stans' Cafe, a grain of rice represents one person.

In the former metalworking factory in Birmingham are billions of grains of rice, 112 tonnes, 6.7 billions grains, representing each person on the planet. The landscape of rice mountains represents a different population, each with a story about the world's people, politics and current affairs.

The exhibiton has toured Los Angeles, Melbourne, Madrid and New York City, and is now returning home to Birmingham.

After Nature depicts a future landscape of wilderness and ruins. Part dystopian fantasy, part ethnographic museum of a lost civilization, the exhibition is an examination of humankind's relationship to nature.

Including over ninety works, it brings together an international and multigenerational group of contemporary artists, filmmakers, writers, and outsiders. The exhibition is organized by Massimiliano Gioni, Director of Special Exhibitions.